Demand for IT staff fell at twice the rate of demand for staff
in all industries, according to the latest
employment survey from sector skills council
E-Skills UK.
Overall demand for staff in the UK fell by 5% in Q3 2008 to
approximately 1.9 million vacancies, but the number of ICT
positions on offer dropped 10% to 161,000 positions, E-Skills UK
reported.
There was falling demand for both permanent and contract posts
as vacancies shrank by 9% and 13% respectively over the quarter to
130,000 and 31,000 positions, it said.
Paradoxically, the number of firms that said it was harder to
find skilled staff almost double from 17% to 31%.
E-Skills UK, which monitors job advertising to compile its
figures, said the only rise in demand was for programmers and
operations staff, which rose 4% and 1% respectively were observed
over Q2-Q3 2008.
Networking jobs fell furthest (down 17%) among permanent
positions. This was followed by database (down 13%), PC support
(down 12%), software engineering (down 12%) and systems development
jobs (down 10%).
Among contract positions, there were declines of up to 20% or
more in the case of internet positions and PC support staff. There
were falls of 10% for the remaining groups and only software
engineering rose - by 1%.
Even staff with specialist skills did not escape. Demand for
permanent staff fell for around two-thirds of the technical skills,
with long-term falls noted for SAP, Embedded and Windows NT in
particular, down 5%, 5% and 15% respectively in consecutive
quarters.
Contractors fared little better. Demand fell for just over 25%
of technical skills. Frame Relay, Delphi, Macromedia, Active X and
Corba in particular all noted declines of 100% compared with the
previous quarter.
However, these declines were limited to one quarter only. The
figures showed a longer-term decline (ie four consecutive quarters)
in demand for .net, JCL, OOD, SMTP and VBA. "No skills increased in
demand over more than two consecutive quarters," E-Skills said.